Speed Dating With the Dead (31 page)

The subdued
thump
reached them a split-second later, and by then Kendra was gripping the rail, hugging her sketch pad to her chest as if it were a sacred text that would solve the crazy riddles of the night.

“Dad,” Kendra said, probing a foot out to see if the stairs still remained.

“Hear that?” Cody said.

On the floor below, people were shouting and scurrying in the dark. Deeper, the squeal and snap of straining wood mixed with a rumble of loose stones and a faint crackling sound. The hotel shifted again, as if knocked loose from its moorings and sliding down a slope.

“We need to get out of here,” Cody said. “This place has got a bad case of the shakes, and it was matchsticks and glue to begin with.”

“I can’t leave without Dad.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

“Who’s there?” someone yelled from the landing below, a man with a gruff, clipped voice.

“SSI,” Cody responded.

“One of your—our guy—I think he’s dead.”

Kendra and Cody headed toward the commotion, aided by light that leaked from a distant window that had broken open during the tremors. “Please don’t be Dad,” Kendra whispered.

“What’s going on?” Cody said, trying to project authority, though Kendra could hear the suppressed panic in his voice.

“This—thing—like a big lizard or something—”

“It was a black woman,” someone else cut in. “She had a knife.”

“It wasn’t a knife—”

“And then all our flashlights went out at once—”

Kendra couldn’t tell how many people were gathered on the landing, but by the time she and Cody reached the body, five had offered opinions. From the description, the victim didn’t sound like Dad. They bent over him, Cody checking his pulse. Kendra was afraid to touch the body but she forced herself to put her palm near his mouth. She felt no breath of wind.

“Did anybody report it to the front desk?” Cody asked. “The land line ought to get 9-1-1 even if there’s no cell signal.”

“You kidding?” said the gruff man who’d originally hailed them. It was too dark to make out his face, but he was tall and heavyset and Kendra remembered he’d put “West Virginia” on his registration address. He spoke with a rural Southern accent. “You reckon any of us wants to wander around in the dark when some nut has a knife?”

“It was a lizard,” a woman insisted. “I saw its scales and it had...it had....”

“Had what?” Cody said. “Nothing could be crazier than what we’ve already heard.”

“A tail,” she finished.

“Lord, help us,” another said.

“Ain’t the Lord’s doing,” said Gruff. “Somebody with a knife. See?”

A metallic
skritch
was followed by a small flame erupting, and Gruff bent down with the Bic lighter, illuminating Burton’s corpse. “Yuck,” he said, wiping at his ragged moustache. “Took his tongue, looks like.”

Wet, dark gore surrounded Burton’s lips and his mouth was a torn maw. His eyes were open and staring, blank with death and already losing their luster. His left arm was ripped and his jumpsuit was blotched with dark stains. A rusty, cloying odor hung over the landing.

“Ah, Burt,” Cody said with a sad sigh. Kendra touched his shoulder in a gesture of compassion. She’d liked Burton, and Dad would be devastated, but right now she was too shook up to feel much grief.

“It wasn’t one of the ghost kids that did this,” Kendra said.

“Ghost kids?” said Gruff.

“How many are in your group?” Kendra asked.
And have you seen Digger Wilson?

“Eleven,” said a short woman whose silhouette was barely visible at the edge of the Bic’s light. “Burton told us to wait in the room when the power went out, but then we heard the fight.”

Cody tried the window, but it was sealed by ancient coats of paint. He yanked the curtain, pulling the rod down with it. A little more twilight leaked onto the landing. Cody wrapped the fabric around the wooden pole and held it out to the man with the Bic. “Torch.”

“This is going to stink,” Gruff said, but he applied the lighter. The linen curtain burst into a smoldering, oily flame.

“Are you the only group on the floor?” Kendra tried to remember the list of haunted rooms where the hunts would take place, but they all jumbled together. Digger said it didn’t matter whether the hunt location had activity or not, as long as people got their money’s worth. But he’d assumed there was no difference between a cold spot and a dead spot, and now it appeared the entire hotel was one big open grave, spilling out creepy spirits and things that should have been left buried.

“The rest went to the basement,” Gruff said. He snuffed out the lighter now that the torch crackled. A bit of curled ember fell to the wooden floor but Cody stomped it out.

“Smell that?” Cody said.

Kendra’s nose was full of Burton’s raw stench, but she took a sniff. “Smoke.”

“Yeah, but it’s not from this.” He waved the torch. “Come on, people.”

Gruff didn’t like being bossed by a teenager. “Where you going?”

“Out.”

“Them stairs are dangerous,” he said in his Southern accent. “Earthquake or something. You could fall right through.”

“I’m not staying here and waiting for the roof to fall in,” said an elderly woman, in a high tremulous voice. A shawl was draped around her frail shoulders and her darting eyes glittered in the torchlight. She tried to step past Burton’s corpse but slipped in the blood. One leg flew to the side and her bones clattered as she landed and skidded down a few stair treads.

“Dear Christ,” she muttered, moaning in pain and writhing, holding her left ankle. “Broke it.”

Kendra was immediately by her side, squinting at the injured limb. A bone appeared to bulge beneath the pale skin and flaccid muscle. “We’d better get her down.”

“Here,” Cody said, passing the torch to a rotund man in a leather jacket. “Lead them down.”

Cody stooped and picked up the old lady, cradling her in his arms. “Hang on, ma’am,” he said, as she whimpered at the sudden movement.

The smoke was thicker now, and undeniable. “Musta had a short,” Gruff said. “Blew some fuses.”

People who had huddled in the second-floor hallway moved past Gruff and the body, some of them refusing to look down at the mess. The pool of blood had spread so that it now dripped from the landing and onto the lower step in a sickening rivulet. Cody followed the leather-jacketed man, intent on not hitting the old woman’s leg on the shaking stair rail. Kendra counted the group members as they passed to make sure everyone escaped.

“Eleven,” she said. Cody had already made the turn in the stairs, which creaked under the combined weight of those descending, but enough torchlight lingered that she could see Gruff’s scowl.

And you make twelve. Did we gain somebody?

“A nut with a knife,” he said.

She glanced down at the descending group, and a woman looked up at her.

Mom?

The woman—the illusion of her mother, nothing more, surely nothing more—waved at her to follow, and then she made the turn and was gone.

Kendra took a step but slipped in the blood. The man caught her arm and squeezed hard enough to hurt.

“Easy,” she said.

“No, honey, it ain’t easy,” Gruff said. “It’s real, real hard.”

She looked at him, and his eyes were just as dead as Burton’s, the smoky moonlight pushing gray across his skin, the moustache lifting to reveal blunt teeth and a mocking grin. She recognized him now, though it was only through her artistic talent of sizing up facial features.

“Rochester,” she whispered.

“Among other things.”

She tried to pull away, shouting Cody’s name, but another rumble came and the stairs skewed sideways. The wall broke open at the end of the hall, spilling night into the hotel. The smoke made her cough, and the first flickering flames rose from below. The ghost hunters yelled frantically over one another, now fully aware of the danger.

“Maybe if you draw me purty, I’ll let you live,” Gruff said. “Just long enough.”

Her sketch pad was on the landing, forgotten in the chaos. She thought of the fantastic creatures she’d drawn on those pages, the imagined ghosts and disembodied spirits. Her morbid art now seemed like a survival instinct, because she had already dreamed the worst and could so easily accept the unreal.

“What do you want with me?” she said. “You could have anybody.”

“Don’t you get it?”

Her arm was almost numb under his grip. She wondered if Cody had noticed her absence, or if he was so intent on playing hero that he only had room for his ego. A few stair balusters fell from the landing above, clattering against wood.

“I just want out of here,” she said.

“You came back.”

“I’ve never been here before.” She tried to tug free as the hotel groaned around them, timbers snapping overhead.

“You think Digger brought you here for no reason?” Gruff’s face morphed and shifted in Rochester’s, looking almost silly because it still had the moustache, but then the face grew hairy, pointed, and rodent-like, two yellow incisors gleaming in the moonlight. “You don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

In her panic, she couldn’t remember what Cody had said about demons. Something about power. The only power they had was the power you gave them.

“You can’t have me,” she said.

The rodent face twisted and became softer, rounded, clear as a photograph. It was the woman she’d seen on the stairs, the woman who’d spoken to her the night before.

Her mother.

Kendra quit struggling. The smoke grew thicker and flames crackled below like rumpled cellophane.

“I only had you for a while,” her mother said, and though the voice was feminine, Kendra knew it was really Rochester’s. Kendra saw a lot of her own reflection there—the dark hair and moody eyes, the broad nose—and her panic was dampened by sadness. It didn’t seem right that her mother would stay thirty-two forever, would always wear the face in the photograph on her dresser back home, would remain constant while Kendra grew up and older.

Just like my characters. Made from scratch. Not good or evil, just drawn that way.

“What?” Kendra said, coughing against the acrid smoke. “Do you want me to die here? Afraid to be alone?”

Mother’s voice hardened, became a chorus. “We’re never alone.”

The floor tilted, and Burton’s body slid across the landing and thumped down a few steps, rolling over so that his arms were splayed as if in jubilation.

Her mother—
demon, she’s a demon, a ghost kid in disguise
—released Kendra’s arm and she fell against the wall. She glanced out the window, expecting to see fleeing guests on the lawn or the distant red lights of emergency vehicles, but the grounds were still and empty under the moonlight. Smoke drifted toward the surrounding forest like an army of ghosts, melding with the mist in the shroud of night.

The hotel lurched and timbers grated, plaster board crumbling as the hotel shook again. Dad was downstairs somewhere, maybe trapped under the falling rubble or cornered by the fire.

Free now, she clambered up the stairs, thinking she could navigate the third floor and go down the stairs at the other end. She glanced back at her mother—
not my mother
—and Gruff blinked, confused, as if wondering what he was doing standing there with hell erupting around him. He shouted, ran over Burton’s back as he hurried down the stairs, and lost his footing. He tumbled, gasping in surprise, and slipped through a gap of torn wood where the stairs had given way.

Kendra paused, knowing she should run, knowing she could trust none of her senses, but tugged by a heroine’s instinct to save the day.

Emily Dee to the freaking rescue.

Gruff was only visible from the chest up, and he reached toward her with one arm while scrabbling for purchase with the other. His eyes were wide and scared.

“Help,” he wheezed, smoke billowing up around him.

Despite herself, she reached for him. Rochester, or the thing that owned Rochester, had made Gruff delay her until the stairs had collapsed. And now that Rochester had played his game, Gruff was just another toy to be discarded. She stooped and extended her hand, bracing herself against the stair railing, judging the man’s weight at 220 or so.

But just before their fingers met, Gruff slid down a few inches, and then dropped away in a sudden eruption of splinters and rising sparks.

She gazed into the smoking well for a moment, understanding he was lost. In more ways than one.

The hand locked around her ankle.

Kendra kicked, but Burton held tight, his eyes now open and filled with mad light.

“The Diggersh daughter,” he said, the words mushed by blood and gore. “You going to leave without burying me?”

“Sorry, Burton,” she said. “But I know it’s not you.”

She brought her other foot down on his wrist, jamming her heel into the flesh. He didn’t wince but the muscles tensed. She stomped again, sick to her stomach but driven by fear and rage. Bones snapped and the clutching fingers loosened.

Kendra danced away and ran up the stairs to the third floor.

Chapter 47

Violet stood by the main lobby entrance, arms folded.

The small crowd pushed against her, shouting as the smoke blinded them. Rhonda had spit out her gum and Jonathan Holmes, the burly, bald member of SSI, tried to shove past her. The only light was from a torch held aloft by one of the guests. She searched for Philippe among the flame-licked faces but didn’t see him.

Maybe her friends in the basement had taken care of him. She had a new maintenance staff, and they would be on call around the clock, forever.

“Remain calm,” Violet shouted.

“Let us the hell out of here,” Jonathan said.

“The door’s jammed,” Violet said.

“The second floor’s caving and the stairs are shot,” said Cody, the young, good-looking SSI guy. He cradled a whimpering old woman in his arms.

Janey?
Her heart clutched.
No. This place is mine now.

The old woman rolled her face away from Cody’s chest. Violet was relieved. Besides, Janey was too proud to accept help.